The Inspirato Festival is looking for play submissions

From Press Release

Calling all playwrights to submit a ten-minute play for the Inspirato Festival (Toronto’s Annual Ten-Minute Play Festival).

Deadline: January 2, 2010

Next year’s theme: touch

1st prize award.

To submit your play please visit www.inspiratofestival.ca/write-a-play.php for details.

See your story come to life.

 

More on the Insiprato Festival:

The Ten-Minute Play: Original, Relevant & Edgy

How do you engage audiences who normally don’t go to the theatre?

Produce a series of ten-minute plays to showcase this growing theatre art form.

With this in mind, the Inspirato Festival launched Toronto’s first ten-minute play festival over a weekend at the intimate Alchemy Studio Theatre in 2006. It was a perfect venue for a new theatre festival.  The ten-minute play format is well known just south of the border but is a relatively unexplored theatre art form in Canada.

Now entering its fifth season, the Inspirato Festival has produced 45 ten-minute plays involving 107 actors, 45 directors, 30 volunteers and 1,385 audience members.  Over 770 ten-minute plays have been submitted to date.   The theme, for each season, is based on  one of the senses. Next season’s theme is based on the sense of  “touch”.

Some call the ten-minute play the haiku of theatre; short, thought-provoking drama.  As an audience member, if you don’t connect with the ten-minute play you’re watching, another play will. Since ten-minute plays are produced in groupings of five to eight plays, audiences experience a range of perspectives in a single sitting – from the serious, to the absurd, and everything in between.

A ten-minute play is a compact play, with a beginning, middle and an end.  These plays are similar to full-length ones, with conflict, distinctive characters and high stakes. Above all, every line of dialogue is crucial.  Ask anyone who has seen a great ten-minute play and they will tell you that so much can happen in ten-minutes.

Playwrights love it because they get a chance to test drive their creativity with greater odds of getting their plays produced. Actors love it because it offers them more opportunities to practice their craft. Audiences love it because they feel they are getting their monies worth; they don’t have to risk investing their time and money on one play.
The reaction from audiences surpassed our expectations (this past season we had two sold out shows). As awareness grows and word spreads the festival promises to be a hit in the coming years.

Don’t just sit there:  Write a ten-minute play!